4 ways to enjoy your life even when you can’t slow down

By Lisa Earle McLeod

McLeod & More, Inc.

The secret of lifetime happiness isn’t doing less. It’s learning how to enjoy all the responsibilities that make your life worth living.

Running a busy life sounds good in theory. But more often than not, it can feel as if your life is running you. A high impact life, with lots of work and personal responsibilities, is challenging because you care passionately about every single aspect of it. The problem is, when you make everything important, nothing is important. You don’t have a clear sense of priorities and you wind up feeling like a gerbil in a cage frantically running on a little wheel going nowhere.

People often suggest slowing down or taking it easy. But for many of us, that’s not a viable option. The truth is, I don’t want to have a low-stress, quiet, orderly life. I want to have a big life, a meaningful life, one that has an impact on other people. I don’t
want to do less; I just want to enjoy it more.

Here are four things to help you enjoy a fast-paced life.

1. Breathe

When you’re feeling stressed, take two or three deep breaths. Oxygen to your brain and bloodstream will clear your head, give you energy and calm you down.

2. Focus on purpose instead of perfection

When you’re bent on trying to make everything perfect, you tend to elevate the importance of unimportant things, and you’re that gerbil on the treadmill. That’s why you need to be clear on your real purpose. When you have a clarity of purpose — whether that’s helping your clients be more successful or making a difference to your family — that purpose acts as a filter to help you decide what’s important and what’s not.

3. Follow the 1 percent rule

Instead of trying to be perfect at everything, pick something that’s going to make a difference, and make a vow to get 1 percent better at it everyday.

If you want to drive more revenue, spend five minutes a day listening to your best customers. If you want to be a more patient parent, spend the same five minutes listening to your kid without interrupting them. You don’t have to transform yourself overnight, just get a little better every day.

4. Be grateful

Let’s be honest, a lot of our stress comes from feeling overwhelmed and feeling sorry for ourselves. We’re so wrapped up in how many things we have to do that we can’t see how good we really have it.

If you own a business or hold a job and you have the freedom to go to work every day, you’re one of the lucky ones. Even
if you’re struggling, you’ve still got it better than a lot of other people in the world.

Gratitude is the gateway drug to happiness. If you’re feeling frazzled, think of something or someone you love, your kids, nature or your dog. Within seconds, the positive thoughts will stimulate the release of feel-good chemicals in your brain.

Start counting up all the things you’re grateful for, you’ll feel your heart start to shift, and suddenly your life and your business seem a whole lot more manageable. As my dear friend, best-selling author Mike Robbins says, “Gratitude and victimhood can’t exist in the same space.”

The secret of lifetime happiness isn’t doing less. It’s learning how to enjoy all the responsibilities that make your life worth living.